News, Fiction, WordPress

Trackbacks Are Working

Trackbacks are used by bloggers to inform each other, when they link to each others blogs. If I link to a post on someones blog, I send her a trackback, so she knows who links to her work.

I keep track of everyone who comes to Where Did My Brain Go? but I just look at totals of visitors, not at individual entries. Totals rise when I write about Bear Grylls and Osi Umenyiora. Totals drop, precipitously, when I don’t write anything at all.

Two days ago, after not writing anything on Where Did My Brain Go? for almost for a month, my visitor totals dropped so much, that I decided to look at individual entries. Among these log entries, I found about a dozen requests, which ended in “/trackback/” — but I did not have a single trackback!

I clicked on one entry, for example: https://wheredidmybraingo.com/welcome/trackback/ and got a “File Not Found” error. (removed invalid link 06-17-09)

Unfortunately, my clueless message was too clueless for the gurus, but I got some unexpected help which explained how to fix the problem, with three lines of code.

Wordpress Dashboard

Occasionally, a graphical interface is helpful, and one of those helpful GUIs, is the well-designed Wordpress “Dashboard” shown above.

The Dashboard is a collection of Wordpress news, instructions, tutorials. When you login to Wordpress, without specifying an address, you are greeted with the Dashboard.

When I logged in yesterday, for the first time in awhile, I was determined to fix trackback, but I was still completely clueless. However, I perked up as soon as the dashboard was displayed, when I saw the word “trackback” among the titles, in Other Wordpress News.

That’s it! Save your file, reload your blog, and select a post. Depending on your theme, you should see “leave a response or trackback from your site“ after the post. You should be able to see it on this post to see it now.